LINGUIST List 2.246

Monday, 27 May 1991

Disc: Pronoun Doubling

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1. , Re: Pronoun Doubling
2. "GEERAERTS DIRK, Beeken Jeannine", Re: Pronoun Doubling

Concerning the Swiggers article mentioned by Bert Peeters and Dirk Geeraerts
earlier, on Pronoun doubling in Flemish dialects. Like Bert Peeters and 
Koenraad De Smedt, I also have Pronoun doubling ina similar fashion in my
own dialect (Teralfene, Brabant, Dender Valley, between Aalst and Ninove). I
sent a message of data which got lost in the mail, but it turns out, on 
reading Swiggers that his is a very neatly laid-out account of the same facts.
For those poor souls who don't read Dutch, I thought it would be nice to very
briefly summarize the contents of Swiggers' article (Leuvense Bijdragen, 76
(1987), 159-170): the title is: Voornaamwoorden met onderwerpsfunctie in
Brabantse dialecten (Pronouns with subject function in Brabant dialects). I 
will give examples with the first person singular pronoun only, but the
principles remain the same with other persons and numbers. I am putting
Swiggers' phonetic spelling of the Leuven dialect in some standard spelling
version:
I PREVERBAL (SUBJECT PRONOUN)
a Unstressed kem gewacht 'I have waited' (k is the pronoun)
b Stressed: ik em gewacht 'I have waited' (ik is the pron.)
II POSTVERBAL
a Unstressed emek da gezegd? 'Have I that said' (i.e. have I said that?),
 always interrogative
 (ek is the pron.)
b Stressed: emekik da gezegd? 'Have I I that said' (i.e. have I said that?),
 always interrogative, (ek and ik are both prons.
 first case of pron. doubling)
III COMBINED SYSTEM
a Unstressed kemekik gewacht 'I have I I waited' (i.e. I have waited)
 a combination of Ia and IIb, but it's not
 interrogative
b. Stressed ik emekik da gezegd 'I have I I that said' (i.e. I have said that)
 a combination of Ib and IIb, not interrogative
 either
This is the way Swiggers presents things. One thing he does not do is tell us
the semantic/pragmatic differences between these forms. Clearly II is
interrogative, but the postverbal clitics also occur when there is an adverb
in preverbal position, thus gisteren emekik da gezegd 'yesterday I said that'.
The stressed forms clearly have soem focus or contrast on ik. The problem is
then to distinguish pragmatically between I and III, does anyone have any ideas?Also, Does anyone know whether Pierre Swiggers has an E-mail address? I think he
is the only other Belgian interested in Flemish dialects and in Native American
languages.
Willem J. de Reuse
Dept. of Anthropology
University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721

Two short points in connection with pronoun doubling in Dutch:

- Bert Peeters assumes that the clitic/unaccented 'de' in 'hedde gij' is
a reduction of 'gij gij'. This is historically incorrect: the unaccented form
is a reduction of the Middle Dutch 2 sg pronoun 'du', which is related to Germa
n 'du', and which has been replaced in the standard language by 'jij'. The 'gij
' form is historically 2 pl, but was later used for the singular as well. Now,
'gij' mostly occurs in the dialects, and in archaic/religious standard language
(although there is a tendency in Belgian Dutch to use 'gij' in standard speech)
. Notice that the 'de/gij' sequence in cases of dialect pronoun doubling is not
general in the dialects: in the province of West Flanders, for instance, the
unaccented form is 'ji' rather than 'de':
 Ga-je gi mee ?
 Come-2sg you along ?

- Dutch also exhibits the clitic use of the unaccented pronoun forms as
noted by G. Fanselow in Bavarian, specifically as attached to comps. This
is, however, geographically rather restricted. To my knowledge, it occurs
mostly in the province of East Flanders. One gets sentences like:
 Da-ze zij nog ziek zijn
 That-3sg they still ill are.

 D. Geeraerts

[End Linguist List, Vol. 2, No. 246]